Anonymous user sends ETH from Tornado Cash to prominent figures following sanctions

One day after Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for its role in cryptocurrency money laundering, transactions of 0.1 Ether began to appear from the smart contract. They were sent to high-profile figures like Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, and Jimmy Fallon, American television host. The source of transactions for Tornado Cash designs cannot be traced. This means that either one person or multiple entities could have been involved.

Notable individuals/companies who just received funds from a government-sanctioned entity: – Jimmy Fallon – Shaquille O’Neal – PUMA – Randi Zuckerberg – Logan Paul – Brian Armstrong – Steve Aoki – Ukraine Crypto Donation – Dave Chappelle – Beeple Field day for investigators. https://t.co/9HDJmppzT2
— FatMan (@FatManTerra August 9, 2022

It is illegal for U.S. entities and persons to interact with Tornado Cash smart contract addresses, blockchain, or business-wise. For willful noncompliance, penalties can include fines up to $50,000,000 and 10-30 years imprisonment.

The consistency of transactions suggests that the sender may be trying to prank the recipients and draw law enforcement attention to them. The Treasury sanctions, however, require that the recipient “willfully” engage with blacklisted smart contracts addresses in order to be subject to possible criminal proceedings. It is therefore unlikely that Tornado Cash tokens received on a gratuitous or uninformed basis without prior engagement or knowledge could be considered a violation.

Alchemy.io and Infura.io, Web3’s development platforms, joined Circle, stablecoin issuer Circle, and programming depository vault GitHub to blacklist the Tornado Cash addresses that were sanctioned and block access to its front-end app. Tornado Cash had tried to resolve concerns that its platform was being misused by hackers to launder stolen cryptocurrency funds months before by disabling illicit wallets access to the application. Roman Semenov, the co-founder of Tornado Cash, stated at the time that the instrument blocks access to the DApp interface, not the underlying smart contracts.

Tornado Cash had tried to resolve concerns that its platform was being misused by hackers to launder stolen cryptocurrency funds months before by disabling illicit wallets access to the application. Roman Semenov, the co-founder of Tornado Cash, stated at the time that the instrument blocks access to the DApp interface, not the underlying smart contracts.